Chris Ellington is the CEO and Founder of Article Marketer. With over 20 years of marketing experience and expertise, he works with small business owners clarifying strategic business initiatives. He guides them in focusing on the most important and profitable aspects of their businesses. Less than a year old, the Article Marketer site already serves thousands of authors and has successfully completed more than 3.3 million article submissions.

Question: I stumbled across your site by accident one day when I was approving articles on a list I owned. That's how I found you. Tell me how you got started in article writing and promotion.

Answer: Content is the foundation of any internet marketing campaign. No matter what you choose to do, whether it's hard-core SEO, Google AdWords, search enging marketing, email marketing, or any other form of online marketing — the web is fundamentally built around content.

Creating and providing content to the literally millions of content sites and newsletters just seemed to be a smart move. Did you know that there are now more websites on the 'net than there are people on the planet? The webmasters of those sites simply don't have time to create the sheer volume of content they need to fill their newsletters.

I started sending articles to people who wanted content, and I was amazed at the results. More targeted traffic started showing up at my various sites. With more targeted traffic comes greater conversion — which means more people to opt-in to my lists, more affiliates join my programs, and more sales of my products and services.

The problem was I was spending too much time submitting articles by hand. I knew there had to be a better way. There were services to do article submission — some charging up to $400 per article! — and there was software to download and install, but I was still chained to my desk to do the actual submission work.

My consulting work with small business owners had taught me that what the market needed was a low-cost, automated, hands-free solution. I set out to build a service that would alleviate all of the problems that I'd seen with article marketing: either time-consuming and tedious drudgework or high expense for the author, while being spam-ridden for the newsletter editors and content site owners.

I put together a team and we created completely automated submission, free article review to help each author get better results, and a team of human-spam-blockers who make sure that spam never goes through our servers. Article submission is affordable to small business owners through a unique subscription model that allows an author to submit an unlimited number of articles without having to factor in the expense of each and every article.